Jonathan Thompson: When the United States was expanding westward in the 19th century, the federal government was stealing land from the Indigenous peoples who had inhabited what we now call the western United States for millennia, and putting that land into what they called the public domain. They created mining and homesteading laws to give that land away to white settlers who were moving westward. Some of the public domain land was withdrawn and turned into national forests, and some was withdrawn to create national monuments. But even after all mining claims were made, after forest reserves were taken out, and after national monuments like Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon were taken out, there were still millions and millions of acres of public domain left. Most of that land was grazing land, and ranchers ran their cows on the public domain without any regulations or paying any fees. That was true up until 1934 when the Taylor Grazing Act was passed, which created some regulations and also created a very low grazing fee for cattle. Over time, efforts to impose order on the free range of the public domain centralized under the General Land Office and then the Grazing Bureau, which in the 1940s became the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
As they started stepping up regulations, ranchers got upset because they didn’t want to pay to graze their cows on public land. In the middle of the 1940s there was a big revolt amongst ranchers of the rural West, as well as a lot of politicians, who wanted to transfer the public domain to ranchers or the states so that they could have a free range on it again. That didn’t succeed, but it set something in motion that continued for years after, as over time there was more encroachment on the public domain and what the ranchers saw as their rights.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s a bunch of environmental laws were passed—The Clean Air Act, The Clean Water Act, The Endangered Species Act—and that culminated in 1976 with the passage of the Federal Land Policy Management Act, which said that the Bureau of Land Management was going to manage public domain land for multiple uses which include recreation, sightseeing, and wildlife. Just as importantly, there would be no more privatization of public land. That angered a lot of people in the rural West because they felt that the public land was their birthright, and that started what we now call the first Sagebrush Rebellion, which was in the late 70s during the Carter administration. A lot of ranchers, as well as extractive industries and the politicians who they supported, rose up and tried to pass laws that would transfer public lands to the states and ultimately privatize them. None of them progressed very far and then Ronald Reagan, a self-proclaimed sagebrush rebel, was elected. He appointed James Watt (also a sagebrush rebel) as his Interior Secretary to oversee all the public lands, so the rebellion faded away.